Talk:Parrot

Haven't you heard of a Jackdoor, Sam? Or aJar? Or..... AlanE 01:22, 1 June 2015 (EDT)

I hope you're joking--I know that doors are very rarely jars, but a door can be ajar. But your erudition on many subjects (especially non-United States use of English) is so much greater than my own that I can't be sure. Just so you know, I actually googled the phrases "they walk with a rolling gait" and "they walk with a rolling gate". They both got hits! Far more "gait" than "gate", of course. Most of the "gate" hits were Conservapedia, but not all. Of course we all know that spelling (and grammar, and lucidity) is a lost art. SamHB 01:50, 1 June 2015 (EDT)

Show me the "gate" hits concerning Conservapedia from Google. Karajou 01:53, 1 June 2015 (EDT)

I did a quoted string search of "they walk with a rolling gate". I got, in part:

About 46 results (0.35 seconds) Search Results

Parrot - Conservapedia www.conservapedia.com/Parrot Conservapedia Jan 27, 2015 - On the ground they walk with a rolling gate. Both feet are zygodactyl, i.e. two toes in front, two toes behind, a trait shared with owls and ...

Cockatoo - Conservapedia www.conservapedia.com/Cockatoo Conservapedia Nov 5, 2013 - On the ground they walk with a rolling gate. Both feet are zygodactyl, i.e. two toes in front, two toes behind, a trait shared with owls and ...

Amazon parrot - Conservapedia www.conservapedia.com/Amazon_parrot Conservapedia Oct 18, 2013 - On the ground they walk with a rolling gate. Both feet are zygodactyl, i.e. two toes in front, two toes behind, a trait shared with owls and ...

Parakeet - Conservapedia www.conservapedia.com/Parakeet Conservapedia Oct 16, 2013 - On the ground they walk with a rolling gate, their long tails slightly elevated off the ground. Both feet are zygodactyl, i.e. two toes in front, two ...

and then a bunch of non-CP things, from places like www.benzworld.org, www.allmanbrothersband.com, www.freerepublic.com, and so on. All very weird. SamHB 02:24, 1 June 2015 (EDT)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch....Sam; you're too serious, mate. (Though not as serious as some) My "jackdoor" was a misspelling of the bird, 'jackdaw', as "gate" was a misspelling of "gait". (Only, mine was deliberate.) A jar is also a bird - usually known as a "nightjar" - and, as you thought, I joined the jar with its indefinite article so as to keep the door/gate reference. AlanE 02:47, 1 June 2015 (EDT)

I'm taking back what I said above. But the points are these: one, we simply cannot make up stuff out of thin air; that is called lying, and it has no place here or anywhere else for any reason. And two, we cannot take a spelling error and turn it into a major catastrophe. It's simple human nature to make mistakes, and that includes something as mundane as a written word. It doesn't take much to correct it. Karajou 03:06, 1 June 2015 (EDT)

Well, not surprisingly I was badly outclassed by your linguistic wit, though I did get the "ajar" reference, and I almost got the "gate / door both swing on hinges" reference.

The reason for the Googling was that I know that "gait" means a style of walking, and was 99% sure that that was the word that was supposed to be used. But 99% isn't good enough when I'm way outside of my area of expertise; perhaps I don't really know what "gait" means. So I Googled the two phrases, expecting to find many hits with "gait" and only a very small number with "gate", the latter just being the Conservapedia article and maybe a couple of completely random things. The first part of the hypothesis turned out to be correct—351 hits for "gait". But "gate" got a surprisingly large number of hits. They claimed it was 42, though only 11 were showing.

The first screenful of hits had 4 for Conservapedia (I've fixed them all) and 2 for the others. Scrolling down, and clicking "next", got the other 5. I didn't go through all the others, but I looked at just enough of them to see something really weird going on. There are a few references to something about climate change causing sea otters in Port Heiden, Alaska to be starving. They are going up on dry land, with a "rolling gate". It seems that when you post something on a blog, it gets splattered around the internet, with many of the exact same phrases.

When I clicked on the "If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." thing, it went up from 11 to 23, but still not 42. I will never understand what Google thinks it is doing.

So that's what happened. All over a trivial spelling error. I think all 3 of us took it too seriously. But at least I learned what "zygodactyl" means. SamHB 00:47, 2 June 2015 (EDT)

At least none of us went off in a fit of high gudgeon. 03:27, 2 June 2015 (EDT)

the spelling errors were mine. Sometimes I do that, like the failure to capitalize the first word in this paragraph. But the point is that anyone does it; whether or not you're conservative or liberal or how good or bad you are on a keyboard makes no difference. What I do expect is that if someone finds it, just correct it and go. And on a side note, from what I've seen in many websites it is only the liberals (aka "grammar nazis") who have the "curmudgeon" problem when a conservative misspells something. Karajou 05:07, 2 June 2015 (EDT)